Sometimes figures jump out from the pages of reports as they eddy across the desk before settling into the sedimentary layers of yesterday’s news.
This week it was $17bn – that’s billion, with a ‘b’– being the amount of superannuation entitlements the Australian Taxation Office estimates has NOT been paid to Australian workers over the past five years.
Actually, that tax office estimate is considered by experts to be low-ball. Phil Gallagher, the former director of Treasury’s retirement income modelling task force has estimated the amount of unpaid super is closer to $5.6bn a year, with 2.7 million Australians missing out on money they are entitled to.
Gallagher has mapped where those workers are, the ones being robbed of a chance of a reasonable retirement by stingy employers not paying the 9.5% of wages required to be paid as superannuation.
In effect, it’s a map of disadvantage, a directory of areas of high unemployment and low-paid or insecure work, where workers are likely to be most desperately in need of the payments to avoid a miserable old age.
This parliament may appear paralysed with ever more outlandish citizenship revelations, and by the ever more tenuous arguments in a marriage equality survey we didn’t really need to resolve the issue, but this turned out to be one area where something was actually happening.
The financial services minister, Kelly O’Dwyer, announced a long list of changes to try to force employers to pay what they owe – from requirements to report what they are actually paying more frequently to giving the tax office more powers to go after employers doing the wrong thing.
“Employers who deliberately do not pay their workers’ superannuation entitlements are robbing their workers of their wages. This is illegal and won’t be tolerated,” she said in a statement as she announced the changes. Amen to that.
With an electorate increasingly of the view that “the system” is rigged to ensure that the well-off stay that way while ordinary workers struggle, it is a mystery why the government doesn’t make more of concrete efforts such as this to make things a little bit fairer. One foot in front of the other governing. Getting things done.
When it comes to super, that could also involve revisiting the $450 a month earnings threshold below which employers don’t have an obligation to pay super.
A recent Senate inquiry heard evidence that this was being exploited by dodgy employers, who deliberately rostered staff so as to keep them under the threshold, or who defined ordinary hours in a restricted way, so that additional hours were classified as overtime and therefore did not count towards the minimum.
O’Dwyer’s superannuation announcement got some coverage, but not nearly as much as the cartoonish efforts of the finance minister, Mathias Cormann, and the treasurer, Scott Morrison, to paint the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, as a “neo-socialist” leading “new red Labor” towards a dystopian future where we’ll all be ruined by high levels of taxation.
Even if voters were still persuaded by such sweeping ideological declarations, and there is plenty of evidence they were not, it’s a hard argument to sustain when the politicians making it are themselves proposing a personal tax increase (remember the budget promise to increase the Medicare levy, from 2019, to help pay for the national disability insurance scheme) and some pretty radical interventions in markets, including in electricity, gas exports, banking and water entitlements.
Polling suggests the electorate is more inclined to like, not fear, Labor’s policies. Morrison concedes households are stressed because many haven’t had a pay rise in a while, but he insists pay rises will be even harder to get if Labor wins government and “smothers the economy with higher taxes”.
But this week’s Essential poll showed 51% of the electorate think the tax system is unfair, including 36% of Liberal/National voters. And 60% feared some corporations didn’t pay their fair share and 78% that some wealthy individuals didn’t. As Peter Lewis points out, Labor’s allegedly “red” taxation policies are aimed at exactly that real or perceived inequity and avoidance – cracking down on trusts, negative gearing and multinational tax avoidance.
The Coalition seems to have belatedly realised that Labor’s inequality message is resonating, that its own position is ideologically somewhat confused, and has decided the best course is to drown the whole discussion in a blizzard of hyperbole.
But I wonder whether, in the absence of convincing ideological arguments, the electorate might be more impressed by a government that just goes about solving problems. The Coalition has made headway on multinational tax avoidance, fairer tax treatment of personal superannuation savings and making sure workers get their proper super payments.
Party strategists might complain that emphasising these things provides insufficient political “differentiation”, but at least the Coalition would be talking about the issues that are worrying voters.
